This application simply created a partition on Mac’s hard disk and installed the required components and drivers to run Windows 10 on the Mac natively. Until it introduced its custom Apple Silicon-based Macs, Apple allowed one to install Windows 10 directly via Bootcamp. Plus, the Windows 10 version you will be running on your M1 Mac will be the ‘ARM’ flavor, which means you are going to face some app compatibility issues. This should lead to a slight performance penalty, but it is unlikely to matter to most people. Instead, you will be running it virtually. And we are going to do use just that to install Windows 10 on your M1 Mac using Parallels Desktop.Īdmittedly, you will not be running Windows 10 natively on your M1 Mac. Thankfully, there’s virtualization support on the new Apple Silicon chips. Previously, the common x86 architecture meant that it was easy to run Windows 10 on an Intel-based Mac, but that’s not the case anymore. Thankfully, there’s a way via which you can install Windows 10 on your M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, or the iMac.Īpple’s M1 chip is very different from the traditional x86 architecture-based CPUs that modern PCs, laptops, and even Intel-based Macs use. However, one of the downsides of using an M1 Mac is that they do not support Bootcamp, meaning you cannot install and dual-boot Windows on it.

The performance of M1 Macs will keep on improving as more and more apps are optimized for Apple Silicon. But, we don't have enough information to really make a determition about whether that's happening or not, IMHO.Apple’s M1-based Macs are really, really fast. That starts to look like Microsoft forcing you to buy a preferred partner vendor's (Intel's) hardware to run their software product, when it would otherwise work on a non-preferred vendor's hardware (Apple). The first position starts to look more dubious if they're specifically going out of their way to break Windows' ability to function on the M(x) chips.

The second is, IMHO, perfectly reasonable, even if I think it's a bad move long term for Microsoft to shut themselves out of an entire hardware platform, and certainly not a good look for them. Or: Are they just saying that it's unsupported, they're not going to promise it works, and Microsoft Tech Support won't help you if you do it? So the question is: Does the Windows 10/11 license explicitly forbid certain types of virtualization, and if yes, is that prohibition defined in a way that clearly encapsulates running Windows 10/11 (ARM version) on a Mac M(x) chip? Microsoft, a private entity, can't declare anything illegal. They can take a position that a practice is in violation of their license agreement for Windows 10/11, but until a court rules on the matter, one can't make a statement on whether the practice is actually illegal.

Running windows 10 on m1 mac